The 23rd Avenue, Golden Gate and Alden branches of the Oakland Free Library
were designed by Charles W. Dickey and John J. Donovan. The three buildings have virtually identical plans but
different period costumes: Spanish Colonial for 23rd Avenue, Tudor Revival for Alden and Georgian for Golden Gate.

This branch was one of four Carnegie libraries built under a 1914 grant to the city of Oakland. It served as a library from its
construction to the late 1970s. Physically it is slightly but not greatly changed inside and out [as of 1996].

Oakland pioneered branch libraries in California, opening branch reading rooms as early as 1878 and continuing to emphasize
neighborhood branches as the city expanded.

The 23rd Avenue branch traces its history to a reading room established in 1890 in what was then the easternmost part of Oakland,
under the auspices of the Library Board with assistance from the 23rd Avenue Improvement Club. It occupied a succession of rented locations on the
busy 23rd Avenue commercial strip back to back with the present location.

The building unveiled today as the Victor Martinez Community Library was part of a Carnegie Foundation endowment of four libraries given to the
city of Oakland between 1916 and 1918. Oakland's librarian at the time, Charles S. Greene, believed that the city's people would benefit most
from libraries placed within their communities.

Despite this vision, the building was one of seven branch casualties of budget cuts in the late seventies, severing vital library life-lines in
poor and working communities. From the early 70s untill the late 80s, this building was a school created during the Chicano Movement called the Emiliano
Zapata Street academy. Since then, the "Latin American Branch" library building located at the corner of Miller and 15th st. has mostly sat empty, despite
the fact that the next nearest library is miles away, and increasingly difficult to access in a city like Oakland with an increasingly expensive transit
system. With its eroding chain link fence and decaying, armored exterior, the building is much more than an eyesore; the unused, but inaccessible, space
creates a life-draining dark vacuum of stability that serves at best as a convenient place for the unscrupulous to dump their old mattresses, couches
and assorted garbage.

This morning, a group of activists opened this building again for use as a library. Inside is the modest seed for a library and community center - hundreds
of books donated by people who envision the rebirth of local, community-owned libraries and social and political centers throughout Oakland. We've named the
building after recently deceased author, Victor Martinez, who overcame a young life of hard agricultural work to become a successful writer in the Bay Area.
His semi-autobiographical novel, Parrot in the Oven, has become a seminal work of the Latino experience. Martinez died last year at 56 of an illness caused
by his work in the fields.